On Enhancing Multipath Data Transport via Traffic Splitting

摘要: As a rule, a communication network does not expose its complete structure to end systems. Consequently, end systems must rely on a single path provided by the network. The recent development of multipath data transport protocols (eg, multipath TCP), has changed this by allowing end systems to explore and more fully use path diversity that often exists within networks. However, this relies on end-systems being multi-homed, which is often not the case. This paper explores the benefits that traffic-splitting functionality at intermediate data forwarding nodes can provide single-homed end systems with for exploring and utilizing available path diversity when using multipath data transport. This paper aims to study and quantify multipath transport control in conjunction with traffic splitting and the effectiveness of different traffic splitting architectures.